CABINET Committee on Energy has constituted a committee headed by Minister for Energy Hammad Azhar for reviewing existing petroleum policy in a bid to ramp up oil, gas exploration and production in the country.
About a decade ago, PPP government had framed a petroleum policy but it failed to bring any visible change in oil and gas sector.
There has been no major discovery during all these years.The country’s oil and gas production is rather falling.
According to statistics of Petroleum division, gas production is dropping by at least 6% each year.
There was a time when we were self sufficient in gas production but now rely on imported gas.
Many countries import around 6% of their gas requirement as a stopgap arrangement to meet rising demand.
However, Pakistan is importing 24% of its gas needs as no major supplies are coming from new fields.
This is putting extra pressure on our foreign exchange reserves.In this backdrop, the decision of reviewing petroleum policy is a step in the right direction that in fact should have been taken much earlier.
Anyway, the policy review must focus on giving such incentives and tax holiday to accelerate the pace of oil and gas exploration.
It must also not overlook prospects of offshore exploration.In recent years, US energy giant ExxonMobil and Italian firm Eni had formed a joint venture with Oil and Gas Development Company (OGDC) and Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) for offshore exploration in Karachi.
However, the effort failed but local companies managed to collect some data, which would help make headway in offshore exploration.
Any major exploration will greatly help the country to reduce reliance on imported fuel and address its energy as well as economic woes.
There are some low hanging fruits that also need to be picked.For instance, there are studies that suggest the country can produce 200,000 barrels of oil and 1.2 billion cubic feet gas per day by un-tapping hydrocarbon seepages.
Seepage is an oil phenomenon to find out oil and gas across the world.In China’s Xinjian province, about 2 million barrels per day oil is being produced through seepage.
Similarly huge oil and gas reserves are produced in Virginia State of USA through seepage.
If other countries can do it why cannot we?Time has come to scale up utilisation of Thar Coal.
Apart from generating power from these precious reserves, we must also consider making diesel and gas from them to meet domestic requirements.
